Psychologist's Tools For Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind | Nicole LePera on Impact Theory

so the way we want to create and maintain change is acknowledge that discomfort is part of changing it's part of doing something new it's that unfamiliar space that my subconscious likes to avoid we can even reframe it it's signs that i'm moving in a direction of difference how great so don't expect it not to be there and then we learn to work with it we integrate it in a sense by making one small promise and we focus on keeping it [Music] i hope you guys enjoyed this episode brought to you by our sponsors at mac weldon hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory i am here with somebody you guys are going to love welcome nicole lapera to the show thank you so much for having me tom i am super excited so you are a trained psychologist you had a private practice you're about to become a best-selling author i'm calling that right now i'm telling you homie the book how to do the work is going to smash i am super excited to talk about this um i'm really freaked out by how much one's childhood impacts them and i want to start with that so the book give people the subtitle which i think is brilliant and is going to inform exactly what we're going to talk about in this interview yeah so the subtitle how to essentially heal from your past understand your patterns to create your future and if i'm honest while you know i trained for very many years as a clinical psychologist i know we all like to to joke about how you know part and parcel of the whole psychology field we like to think about our past and to wonder how it informs our present if i'm honest though tom i didn't necessarily learn how powerful our past was in my training i knew it played a part i knew our past experiences you know carried with us in some ways i don't think i understood though how much so and how much most of us into adulthood are actually operating from that past in our in our autopilot that many of us are living day in and day out yeah talk to me about how these things that happen in our childhood which don't need to be mega become the patterns that are our lives yeah and i saw the same patterning in my practice so week after week i would speak to these people who got it who maybe even saw right the ways that their past choices or their continued choices weren't benefiting their future yet week after week a report of that same habit that same pattern those say that same stuckness would come in and what i saw was that in my personal life too i struggled to create change just like my clients and i came to understand why after of course feeling pretty shameful pretty broken i think a lot of us do i would start to hear from my clients reflections of that disempowerment right back hopelessness helplessness a belief that maybe i can't change maybe this future isn't meant for me and that was really heartbreaking what i came to realize is that the reason why we can't change is stored in a very powerful part of our mind called our subconscious so that upwards of 90 95 percent of the time that i think is now the sighted percentage right of our day that we're not really paying attention or that we're in autopilot and what i've realized is in that autopilot are all of these pathways right neurons that fire together wire together if we've practiced pathways most of us from from childhood and beyond we get kind of these ruts as i call them in our subconscious so just to contrast from my conscious mind i have insight i can use my past break and inform patterns that i want to change into my future yet unbeknownst to most of us we're slipping back into that autopilot and we're repeating those old patterns and like i said for many of us we can feel really shameful and we can feel it really broken and wonder why we can't create these changes or maintain these changes over time i want to talk about those ruts so this is something that i've thought a lot about in terms of so i think people will get the neurons of fire together wire together but they don't realize that that can be um so your your brain is a just caloric monster so something like 20 of the calories that you intake go to your brain your brain equals two and a half pounds of body weight so i mean it's a minuscule part of your overall weight but calorically it's it's just the cookie monster and what it's coughing back up into your conscious mind isn't just oh i'm putting two thoughts together it's this feeling i'm used to feeling i i need to be calorically conservative so i'm going to whatever i do a lot i'm going to make that easier to do so feelings that you feel become easier to feel and when i began to understand like how there was this whole tapestry of thoughts feelings actions behaviors that were like a ball that sort of once i triggered one thing it was a whole cascade of stuff now what i love about your book is you're giving people the tools to unwind that so nicole what are those tools yeah and so i love that you're bringing up tom the the caloric expenditure i mean that is one reason there's another reason why we like to stay in those ruts or in those patterns because it's familiar and according to our subconscious or our evolutionary instinct to keep ourselves alive that which is unfamiliar or unpredictable is uncertain it could be threatening it could be the thing that ends my system's life so according to my subconscious we prefer to avoid that at all cost to keep ourselves safe so before you know it for reasons like you're saying to you know can contain calories we get really good at certain things at certain thoughts at certain feelings and they map onto our familiar physiology so the way out first and foremost we want to become conscious we want to see those patterns we want to see ourself operating as what i call our habit self we want to learn how to consciously become an observer of ourselves for a lot of us that's the first practice because consciousness is a practice it's actually firing up our prefrontal cortex it lives right behind our our eyes our forehead and a lot of us aren't used to living from that space the easiest access point to our conscious mind is the present moment and i like to call i like to reference using hooks for our attention because a lot of us we don't we don't flex our muscle of attention very often at all we really do have choice we get to decide what whom or where i'm expending my attention in any given moment yet for most of us we're worrying about our past we're thinking about our future we're lost in thought we're somewhere else so for our entry into our conscious mind we can use the present moment through one of two hooks our breath we're always breathing so if we can learn how to flex that muscle of attention and put our full focus onto the act of our breathing body we become embodied now i'm in my body and i'm present to what's in front of me another hook we can use is our senses the senses what are we seeing what are we tasting can we touch something anything that we can do that senses based can also be our access point to conscious awareness the more constantly present we are the more we have choice we can begin to create new habits and patterns in this moment okay so now let's talk about how people begin to develop that muscle so you've talked about setting alarms people can do that just sort of throughout the day so it'll ping them and hey what are you doing right now right so people begin to train themselves to see how much time they're spending outside of that what techniques do we have beyond that things that are sort of the mental equivalent of going to the gym we want to practice it consistently so starting there um this isn't the light switch i like to say a lot of us you know maybe discover consciousness we know it's there maybe we've practiced once oh i can use my attention i can come here be present yet we don't practice consistently enough um even those of us with a meditation practice where maybe that's the purpose of that one or two or five minutes where i'm sitting my question always remains what about the rest of your day so if you had to force rank the tools so is meditation number one alarms are number two like what what is the the value stack of um practicing attention consciousness is the foundation so whether or not you can develop your consciousness muscle by sitting as a sitting meditation for some of us beginning if i were to speak from my own experience tom that was so overwhelming my body didn't feel safe my thoughts raced i felt so agitated when i would try to sit silently that i actually began to build my consciousness muscle in real time setting those alarms because i found that as i went about my day and my alarm went off and say i was on a walk being consciously present on my walk felt a little less intimidating so i say that to say consciousness is the practice we can develop it sitting in quiet turning inward or in real time and those of us that feel a bit overwhelmed by the first practice can do it in any thing we're doing we can use any context any activity and use our focus of attention to be conscious i've heard people say that they get overwhelmed with meditating but i've never understood like what what is the mechanism are they having feelings are they having thoughts like what what is the genesis of the overwhelm well interestingly enough we can't disconnect those two because thoughts thought long enough lead to a feeling so in my opinion and this is part of the limitation i believe in the old model when we try to think about cbt change our thoughts change our bodies change our actions because those are connected they're in communication at all times so before long a thought thought long enough equals a feeling so for some of us when we sit it's that monkey mind my racing thoughts if there are worrisome thoughts before long i'm in worry now that's what's spinning people out of control they're sitting there suddenly there's no activity to keep them from just like i have to do this and this and this and then they're becoming uncomfortable some of us our bodies based on past experiences maybe we're unsafe maybe we lived in a home where our bodies you know had uh boundaries were or crossed our limits or we just didn't feel safe in our bodies so for some of us even the action of being present in our body equals is an uncomfortable unfamiliar place to be okay so if they're living in distraction they're falling sort of 90 into the default mode network what you were you know the unconscious mind where you drive to work you don't remember how the hell you got there but you got there um going back to that caloric thing it's a strategy the brain employs to make sure that you don't have to think about everything which would be really overwhelming so if they're living 90 of their life in the default mode network the default mode network is worry is the trauma is thoughts about all that what is it about sitting so let me explain why i'm pushing on this so i take a very different approach in life than you and so i am very intrigued you are you are much more compassionate and gentle like the way that i speak to myself is very aggressive and by being aggressive with myself meditation ended up working for me and it was this huge breakthrough but it was just me saying back to the breath every time my thoughts wander back to the breath and every time somebody tells me that meditation doesn't work for them i want to give them all the opposite advice but you have touched so many lives so i want to understand like um why should somebody not force themselves to just sit and come back to the breath why is that breaking down somewhere yeah no i appreciate that and i was giggling when you were when you're saying that because you're very similar to my partner so it's very interesting to hear both sides of that um the reason why we don't is because of safety i keep going back very intentionally to that concept talking about are we safe in our body are we safe you know to to hear the thoughts that we're thinking to experience the underlying sensations or what we know as emotions are we safe the reason why i keep focusing on that word is because our nervous system is always responding to cues specifically around safety is my body safe am i safe in what's happening remember the predictable they're familiar equals safe and when we don't feel safe for most of us because of very real events in our life very real experiences that we had where we fell out of that regulation where something did overwhelm our emotional system or maybe even our physical system in the instances of actual abuse we don't feel safe and so to create safety we don't actually want to dive into the deep end with you know with no raft on and just sink or swim we want to it's called widen the window we want to very gradually show ourselves through living the experience of tolerating discomfort that we can and to do that we want to widen it gradually because we have to remember what created the situation of dysregulation was overwhelm so jumping into that deep end creates another situation of overwhelm we want to empower ourselves most of us by the time we reach adulthood feel so disempowered around our emotions we don't know how to make sense of them we actually don't know how to navigate them we don't have resilience around them what is resilience the ability to become dysregulated with a moderate or a mild amount of stress and then to come back into safety or regulation again those of us who don't feel safe can actually risk that overwhelm and create another trauma in a sense for ourselves if we just dive right in it's really interesting and knowing your story um it's beginning to become clear to me that there are there is this entire array of experiences whether that experiences um stress not feeling safe how you process trauma whatever so the fact that you at one point in your life were just fainting for no apparent reason with no real like i can pinpoint what caused this um that's really interesting talk to me about how you re-grounded yourself into your body so that you could then widen that window so that you could begin using my own words become more courageous in the face of feeling unsafe that process seems to have had pretty magical results in your life um and i'd be very curious to hear the details by the time i started feeding tom i i actually i didn't know what was wrong with me at that point because the symptoms seemed so physical and seemed so brain-based i was scared if i was honest i wouldn't have imagined that as i dove down and began to peel back the onion and unpack all of this that this was related to overwhelming emotions in childhood that was not my first path of exploration my first path of exploration was what is wrong with me um by that time just kind of going back on the physical side of things for me i had headaches my whole life i had had brain fog or kind of that that fogginess not really feeling like my brain was awake all of the time my whole life out of nowhere as i entered into my 30s i started to forget my words mid-sentence memory issues that i always kind of had now seemed i seem to have a really hard time even remembering things that happened last week for instance and then out of the blue i started fainting so of course i was like this must be something wrong with my brain what is it and when i dove into research i then met all of this you know work on epigenetics and the effect that our daily choices and or events that happen to us have on our physical bodies diving in deeper i really understood my nervous system and now i understood my fainting as the effects of accumulated years of living in that dysregulated nervous system so now that i understood what the cause of it was which goes into my definition of holistic holistic for me not only means honoring our mind our body and our soul the interconnectedness of our being it also means exploring what for many of us are the deeper underlying imbalances that are causing what we're calling symptoms or even diagnosis or syndromes right so now that i understood oh for me this fainting could be a symptom of something deeper could be a symptom of how i'm treating my body and how dysregulated my nervous system is so as i began to dive into this research i noticed something else how disconnected i was to my body so once i build the foundation of consciousness that we just talked about once i began to teach myself how to safely inhabit my body i began to do some nervous system regulation techniques and tools the quickest and easiest one that we all carry around with us is around breath work and i started to tune into how was i breathing just checking in with my natural flow of breath and i realized that like many people who struggle with anxiety i had a really shallow chest breath i noticed that sometimes tom when i'm really stressed out i hold my breath i actually don't really breathe much at all and what i learned is each time i do both of those things either just breathe really shallowly or i'm holding my breath i'm actually contributing to my anxiety because i'm keeping my nervous system locked in that fight fight-or-flight mode so i learned a new way to breathe i learned how to use my belly which was hard at first because all of my posture was reflective of all of this constriction and all of this threatening kind of posture and stance of a lifetime though once i accessed my belly i learned that i could learn how to bring teach my body can you walk people through how you did that because belly breathing diaphragmatic breathing changed my life so i'd be curious to know what tools you use for that yeah so for a lot of us who struggle with our posture it's hard um so back straight shoulders back so i started laying down it was difficult for me so i would begin my practice either right before bed or right when i woke up when i was already laying and for me it started with just a small daily promise of five breaths from my deep belly area for me putting my hand on my belly physically so i could feel it when it would expand and when it would deflate was really helpful so that was just a daily promise every time every morning or right before bed i would put my hand on my belly and just practice practice practice but then like i said i wanted to become more aware of how i was using my breath all day long and then building on that foundation can i harness my breath all day long when now life's happening and i have the actual things to be stressed out about right can i use my breath to regulate myself in those moments so it becomes a foundational practice that we can build upon nicole i often hear people ask you how your account grew so quickly and i listening to you now for as many hours as i have i'm going to tell you exactly why you've grown as fast you have instruction manuals should be written by people that struggled to build the item because when you struggled to build it then you know sort of where the pitfalls are like the fact that you can explain to people the a concept which you bring up a lot which i think is really brilliant is these small promises that you make to yourself and earning credibility with yourself things that you know if if life just sort of came easily to you i don't know that you would have access to explaining that to people why small promises why five breaths why not an hour of uh you know breathing from your belly what what's the idea behind those little promises yeah thank you for for highlighting that and for for asking this question it goes back to that subconscious and its desire to remain in that familiar so we create another situation of overwhelm for ourselves those of us who decide that starting tomorrow my life will be different from top to bottom and maybe i have five new ten new things on my to-do list i'm diving into that deep end i'm telling my subconscious that wow my life's gonna do a you know 360 180 by tomorrow i'm probably gonna overwhelm so the way we begin to build and create change what's important is not five new things for as long as i can white knuckle it what's important is one new thing from now until forever that consistency of the habit so we want to make a small promise we're already going to be uncomfortable i talk about this a lot too a concept that i call resistance because every time we set an intention to change even if logically you can have as many of us do a court case for why i really need to stick to this change this time right when i go to either the first time i go to do the new thing or maybe it's the fifth time that i'm trying to now maintain my habit it's only a matter of time before one of two things happen we either get mental resistance in our mind and our thoughts that could look like the endless to do list of other things that we should be doing or maybe the million reasons why this won't work this time or some of it drops into our bodies where we just start to feel agitated or just different than we normally feel and before long one of those two reasons can convince us back into that familiar rut before long i go back to being as i normally am so the way we want to create and maintain change is acknowledge that discomfort is part of changing it's part of doing something new it's that unfamiliar space that my subconscious likes to avoid we can even reframe it it's signs that i'm moving in a direction of difference how great so don't expect it not to be there and then we learn to work with it we integrate it in a sense by making one small promise and we focus on keeping it so i love the mention of reframing talk to me about how big of a piece of your practice was that do you encourage people to do that do you see big changes from it i think reframing can be incredibly important you know thinking about it just when i first learned about cbt that's what it's based on this idea that if i can begin to think differently if i reframe my thought i can access a new feeling a new behavior a new choice on the end of that feeling i still use principles of that we become very locked in the one way we think about things so the more we can expand in any area i i talk about expanding a lot creating space allowing maybe i have my go-to my default thought but maybe i can begin to reframe that and make space for two thoughts three thoughts can you give me give me an example especially as we think about childhood defining so much of our presence can't go back and undo it but you can reframe it what's an example of using that so i talk about reframing in childhood a lot as we become aware of our patterns a lot of times we'll hear make statements of blame right you did this to me um a great reframe in that moment understanding that we were all raised by caregivers that are limited to the extent of what they know how they themselves live what they themselves were modeled so i think that can be an incredibly helpful reframe that things weren't done necessarily to me or because of me in childhood i lived the effects or the results of the very real limitations that my caregivers had based on their own past experience and so the words you just said are what you would tell yourself as you begin to get pissed off or whatever about something that happened it's like hey whoa whoa mom dad lover whatever like hey they've been through a lot and by thinking about that now you're seeing something different is that the idea and just to be clear you're making space for something in addition you don't have to negate because some of us do this and i actually became a pro at this i would explain away my experience i would become so forgiving because they were limited that i wouldn't leave spades for my initial so when i say expand for an additional experience you can absolutely keep the space for your anger your hurt your disappointment and maybe make space for compassion or empathy or forgiveness something else we don't have to just switch it and i again i speak this from my own lived experience of becoming really good at explaining away all of my experience based on the very real limitations that i perceived in others so it becomes my favorite word and i can feel this and and and how do you make sure the ands are productive productive exploring i mean we can become part of the journey of this is getting really curious because for some of us an and could be really productive whatever that reframe is and for another that and could lead down an unproductive road so we have to determine for ourselves that's why i talk about becoming a self-healer really just becoming intimately knowledgeable about yourself so that means exploring witnessing am i the person who this reframe can create helpful space can help me make room for a new feeling a new behavior a new choice or is this and a limitation in my life in a different way how do you help people wrap their heads around like hey i'm really upset about this thing and that's useful or hey i'm really upset about this thing and this this is a pattern we have to interrupt i think sometimes it's exploring exploring the outcomes exploring a lot of times it's getting clear on what kind of utility or usefulness are we looking for and what do i mean when i say this a lot of us when we're looking to create change we actually want the people around us to be the ones changing so it's kind of the radical you know kind of self-responsibility ownership um the conversation i always have around boundaries boundaries aren't ultimatums they're not me pointing some finger at you tom and giving you you know if you do this this will happen if you don't do this this will happen boundaries are for self-empowerment so i answer and i think about things in the same context right what am i looking what pattern am i owning here um what role am i playing and how can i create change whether or not you're being an active agent or an active player as well and sometimes this means being radically honest with ourselves and exploring what our intentions are what our behaviors are and how we're participating in the pattern even in the moments where we're pretty much convinced it's not us um so i think a lot of times it's that deep level of self-exploration that can give us clarity on that what are the tools you give people there's a lot of prompts in your book and again called how to do the work it's a really pretty extraordinary handhold for people where you walk them through you give them tools that they can use on a daily basis which i was very impressed by how do you get them to like we'll take the hard example of they're convinced they're right and yet they're stuck in a rut they're not making the progress they want you recommend that they use like some real radical self-honesty what's that process look like are they journaling are they telling a friend are they seeking feedback like what what is the the step any and all of those things could be helpful um journaling you know for some of us helps us get get the information out there it can help us look at it a bit more objectively once we've written something and we can review it later i'm saying objectively that can be information that is offered to us when we seek support or when someone views upon us or our patterns this looked like oftentimes my partner in the very beginning of healing where you know her being separate from me she could offer observations on habits and patterns and how they were affecting me if i'm perfectly honest i did not want to hear that at first i became very defensive she was definitely wrong and for sure not being supportive of myself so it's very hard to learn how to i think take those objective vantage points objective perspectives in i also believe we can become an objective observer of ourself we can learn how to see how it is that we're participating like i said in real time can you tell me how yeah absolutely when we as we fire up that conscious part of our mind we are we can be viewing ourselves in real time we can hear and see the patterns in our subconscious we're narrating life the large majority of our day all day as we drop in and begin to hear and see those narratives they are very repetitive they are usually around the same stories mack weldon offers industry-leading underwear but they're so much more than just an underwear company they really are a one-stop shop for men's basics of all kinds socks shirts hoodies underwear polos and active shorts mack weldon promises comfort and a consistent fit one of our impact theory team members has a closet full of macweldon clothes and they've become his go-to store for anything he needs especially because mack weldon's website is super easy to use and functional for putting together an order one of our guys has been looking everywhere for a warm knit shirt and he found it on mac weldon's he'd been looking everywhere for a shirt that traps heat without weighing him down while he's out on 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people can use to navigate i think a great yeah safety in our body how does it feel i often think about expansion feeling open and receptive and feeling tight and closed and constricted for me those are my markers of my nervous system when i'm feeling open and expansive and receiving of the world i know that i'm feeling safe i know that i'm in a creative space i'm in a space to connect with other people when i'm feeling tight i even can reflect it sometimes i can catch it in my musculature explain that i don't understand i can catch tension i can catch when i'm holding my shoulders up when i'm crunching myself when i'm feeling more constricted that's a marker that i go back too often because i've learned that maps on to my nervous system and when i'm feeling safe versus when i'm feeling not safe so that's language that can be helpful for people do i feel light do i feel like i've left someone and i want to go see that person again i'm thinking about them positively or when i've left this lunch engagement do i hope that you've lost my number and i never hear from you again i mean that can be interpersonal markers right am i always dodging um this type of experience or this type of event or am i always dodging this type of person or this relationship we can begin to see our own cues our own markers like i said for me i go back to constriction and expansion or feeling receptive and that's how i know if i'm safe or not do you work with people at all on identifying what they're sort of um either attachment style or attack patterns i'm not sure what language you would use around that but you gave a great example of you and lolly how when she's like coming at you then you're closing down which makes her come more or vice versa i can't remember the exact dynamic but it was literally polar opposites and i thought man this is a recipe for disaster and how you began to unwind that i think is really interesting so a lot of people listening might have heard you know attachment styles am i anxious am i avoidant um i think similarly in those terms um i think globally or i know globally that we are impacted by those earliest models of relationships meaning the roles that we played the dynamics that we got here's that word again familiar with right earliest in life that we maybe started repeating once we were toddler age and had peers right we become the helper at home and now we're the helper in our friend group or we're the the yes person always saying yes or the caretaker we tend to be really repetitive in how we relate and i'm of the belief that those earliest patterns again are just repeated in time so whether you do reading on attachment styles and you know that you're anxious or anxious avoidant or you just observe your dynamics and relationships the takeaway is always that which i did in childhood that which was familiar how do i feel bonded to people how do i feel safe with people or not safe with people become those patterns that i repeat over time awareness is key here becoming aware what are my relational patterns how close do i feel to people are there emotions i bring into my relationships or do i keep this type of emotion out or all type of emotions out again do i tend to play one particular role is there always a need or maybe all of my needs that go unmet in my relationships or do i feel comfortable expressing myself when i have a need etc and again i believe that we're very patterned all that lives in our subconscious so becoming aware and conscious allows us to over time begin to break some of those habits and patterns that don't serve me beginning to put up a boundary beginning to say no beginning to express my need when i have it that'll make sense so the subtitle of your book which we talked about at the beginning um i think we've covered two parts of that so we've got the finding our patterns um we've got the healing from the past now i want to talk about something that i found really interesting which is creating your space self which i was very intrigued by that it wasn't creating yourself it was creating your self what did you mean by that how do we create he didn't say discover he said create so how do we create our self yeah and this this is interesting because for me this really turned a belief that i had internalized for quite some time on its head and for a very long time i think like a lot of us i didn't believe that there was much creation that was possible i thought that you know whatever genetics we were born with whatever circumstances we were born into pretty much that would unfold and that would become our path in life with many things outside of our control this was you know evidenced in the field for a very long time when we used to believe in genetic determinism that idea that whatever it was we were given that we don't really change we don't grow we don't evolve our genes are our destiny and now we understand differently we actually know that we operate with our choices meaning what i have genes right that load the gun and then the things i'm doing each and every day determine how i am in life i even believe that things such as personality these patterned ways of being this is exactly what you and i have been talking about we could call that our genetic personality or we could really look at that as a conditioned way of being so when i began to realize that wait a minute things aren't as set in stone i began to entertain many new conversations with myself of possibility of change and i now believe that we actually can create ourselves we can create our future by beginning to make new choices now okay so how do we set the course for that i know you talk about basically future self journaling walk people through that process so future self journaling is actually as someone who never really journaled i never really had a journaling practice growing up however i was diving into the research on neuroplasticity and our incredible brain's power to you know imagine futures and create change just through imagination alone and i created a model a new way to journal based on changing or working toward a future that's different and i called it future soft journaling and i used it myself right from the very beginning of my healing journey i found it really helpful first and foremost to help counter that autopilot i found that for me every day i do my journaling in the morning though you could do it throughout your day at any time the act of sitting down and setting an intention to that day can begin or to continue to do one new thing differently that for me that was the make it or break it between even just remembering that oh wait i'm wanting to do something new because i just like everyone else can wake up tomorrow and slide right into my autopilot and go right into those habits and patterns so for me it was that intentional that conscious mind where i reminded myself that i'm wait i'm actually working toward creating again one small daily promise i also harnessed then our create our brains incredible ability to harness imagination writing in the present tense as if those changes had already been in fact the case so my earliest journaling was around i'm sure this is probably of no surprise to listeners becoming conscious so every day i would journal how my intention was to be a conscious being to be present in the given moment and i wrote it as if it was the case i am a present a present being i am conscious i use my breath to become attentive to the moment at hand or whatever it is i would write as i'm writing that and as i'm quote unquote saying that essentially to my my mind my brain it in that moment doesn't know that's not in reality already happened that i'm not already that conscious being according to my mind in that moment it's as if it's true all of those neurons are firing as if it's true all of that release of you know the emotions as if it's true so now i'm harnessing practice rehearsal mental rehearsal so the more consistently i harness that intention to change each and every day i became conscious about what i wanted to do different and then i began rehearsing it as i was writing it in my journal before long i was able to build the third step in the practice go out and practice remember then throughout my day to tune in to my conscious moment and through utilizing that daily practice of journaling not only did i create a new habit of being conscious i was able to build on that habit and create an incredible amount of change so i have since released those the the template the journal prompt so anyone who's interested can grab those on my website and can get started creating some change toward their future self thinking about the future self and constructing that in a very intentional way i think is one of the most important things that any human being can do i love that you've got such a focus on that how many areas does that apply to is that all for self-healing do you have people use it for career advancement like what what are the limitations of future self journaling there are no limitations as far as i see it so you can repurpose reuse i still use the same template um i change the pattern or what i'm working on each and every day um you know whether or not we want to use it i have a lot of people who use it ourself creates our world so whether or not we're talking our business self our relational self how we feel about ourself and how we relate to ourself internally maps on to how do i relate in my relationships how am i a leader how i express in the world is affected by the relationship i have with myself by how i'm tending to my own needs or not tending to my own needs by how comfortable i am expressing myself to myself let alone to the world so very early on in my field i found and i started to get people from business i'm coming in with a business problem really we're coming in with a self a relationship with self issue a limiting belief a lack of worthiness scarcity around money etc so i think most roads leave lead back to self um so future self journaling and working on this self can help um facilitate its expression whether it's in our business world in our personal world or really anywhere a creative world a lot of us are blocked creatively because of our relationship with ourself that's interesting so what is the number one way that you find people are creatively blocked based on themselves is it a lack of self-worth a lack of their belief in they're creating something of value like is is there anything universal there or is it you know just like as many reasons as there could be yes and i think the most foundational reason we're blocked creatively is because we can't access creativity if we want to go back to abraham maslow some of us might have heard of him in his hierarchy of human needs i'm going to really simplify this at the bottom are our physical needs having a body that's physiologically regulated again really simplifying it this is my maslowian pyramid we have our emotional needs having the ability to tolerate stress to fall out of regulation and to come back and at that tip where he calls self-actualization i believe that's the center of our spiritual needs our heart space that's where creativity lies we have to be in flow we have to be so fully present to what's happening to be even safely present to what's happening being able to fully receive the whole moment to even be able to access that part of our brain so i believe that so many of us are dysregulated at those foundational layers that we can't actually access creativity some of us can't access joy or ease or playfulness this someone was me again back to me i was so dysregulated you would have never heard me refer to myself as a creative being or a creator i mean i now regularly refer to myself that's what i do for my job i'm a teacher i'm a creator i would have never spoken those words having a joyful laugh having playful moments that didn't factor into my daily life and for me it was because i was i wasn't safe enough in my body so that's a big big reason and i bring that up here yes as we become safe and as we become regulated a lot of us then have deeper levels of lack of self-worth where it translates to the inability or the fear of putting our art or our creation or our essence out there but a large majority of us tom are dysregulated at this core level that we can't even safely enter a creative mind because i've heard you talk a lot i know the depths of which you're speaking to the dysregulation i'd like to drill into it so as a guy building a mindset company i didn't want necessarily to talk about health but i do a whole show around health because i fully understand that without getting your body regulated to use your words just just your body like you're eating right you're exercising you're sleeping you're doing some sort of i would say meditation but you know breath work focus work being attentive to the moment if you're not doing that stuff the number of things that break down is is really quite terrifying so for instance like you i went through crippling anxiety and i don't know how badgers was but mine was truly crippling and i didn't understand that probably 60 of it was my diet and it was crazy as i got my anxiety under control and was doing all the mental things that i thought would get me to 100 and it didn't and then really started looking at diet and microbiome and what an impact that has on triggering my anxiety that was pretty eye-opening what advice do you have for people that are dysregulated at forget childhood trauma just like at a physiological level my similarly to your story tom my the foundation of my nutritional balance my sleep sleep is a big critical area that many of us aren't getting enough of or lying to ourselves about how much we're getting and or if we're getting it we're not sleeping well so for me it was building those you know physiological changes shifts in my lifestyle that was a game changer for me the types of food i was eating i had a lot of inflammation that was causing my brain fog um and and again i think this is the case going back in time to my clients of those moments of disempowerment only so much insight this is why again i talk about the need for a holistic model of wellness cbt for a very long time was our gold standard if we're in a dysregulated body only so much changing or reframing our thinking can go so far so this was the big group of people that i was included in and my heart was going out to and i was feeling disempowered right alongside because no no amount of cognitive shifts could affect the dysregulated body so our nutrition getting really conscious about what we're putting in our body how it's making us feel do we eat when we're hungry or do we eat for the many million reasons why many of us eat otherwise outside of being hungry do we even know how it feels to be hungry for some of us just getting really conscious in our body through trial and error determining what makes my body feel the best and then consciously and i make conscious choices all the time around food for me this is a reframe i can offer that can be helpful it's not about restricting when i decide you know not to eat the gluten for this meal it's about knowing the choice right and the outcomes of that choice knowing that if i eat gluten this time and sometimes i do eat gluten i love pizza and every now and again i want a gluten-filled pizza and i will eat that consciously knowing what the fallout will be i know myself enough and i'm embodied enough so for many of us it's just getting in our body determining what food makes me feel like i can perform i have my brain that's sharp and i feel rested sometimes it's sleep getting honest around our sleep yeah everything is trade-offs especially when you're talking about food there are many a delicious thing that i will indulge in very rarely but i will indulge in because it has this extraordinary brain chemistry reaction but i know i'm either i'm not going to sleep as well or i might have an upset stomach or you know just even putting on undesirable body fat um but recognizing like you said that this is a lifestyle choice not about restriction it's just about i know what the trade-offs are sure i i can have it i'm only hurting myself so if the pleasure in that moment outweighs what i know is coming as a result then you know by all means um and so it is interesting like one thing i've seen people really struggle with i'm so curious to know if you if i've got to imagine you've come across this i deserve to be able to eat this ice cream smoke this cigarette um you know whatever whatever that's getting them into trouble and i'm just like i get i actually get the emotion it does seem unfair like for instance if my wife and i who is half my size if we eat the same calories i will put on fat and she'll just get sweaty at night it's crazy so that's really unfair to me i'm like wait a minute what what did i do to deserve these poor genetics and what did you do you know do and i'm i'm happy for you but it also seems unfair so but recognizing that that mentality does not change it like how do you help people out of something so gnarly that has a real reason to be upset about that's incredibly difficult and the end i think can imply here you know honoring the upset honoring the part of you that does feel like you got the short end of the stick or that it is unfair that is still wearing the consequences of our past and making space for you know whatever it is that we want to see happen differently or whatever it is that we imagine would would shift or change in our life if things were to be different that and can go a long way and i say that because i think for a very long time forever in the beginning it's very hard for those of us who've been practicing that short end of the stick dialogue that it's not fair um just like all things we can't vanish that overnight um so for some of us it's just noticing when it's there and unhooking the attention not expecting your subconscious to just realize that oh that's not helpful anymore okay tom i'll just leave you alone then no worries absolutely not your subconscious is going to probably offer you it's not fair narrative in every situation that you would otherwise have thought it's not fair so don't anticipate that it's going to go away what we have control over though is spending less time thinking it so the first time you hear your your mental you know rehearsal if it's not fair instead of just doing whatever it is you typically do going down the you know the the circle of the drain of it's not fair and so all the things that aren't fair we all have the thing we do with the first thought once it becomes that first thought spending less time so that allows us to then expand to make space for something new but i share that first part because i think some of us do magically expect it to vanish we get upset when it doesn't um and then when it doesn't we then spend too much time so we can empower ourselves by acknowledging that it's there and then by removing our attention and building our muscle and refocusing it maybe here is where you offer yourself the reframe that you prefer to practice in that moment which you're not going to believe let me add end on that do not expect to believe the new thought in that moment don't expect to go from it's not fair it's totally fair of course you're not gonna do that 180 though you can begin to practice something new i love that go deeper so i from experience know that a lot of times you're not going to believe what you're telling yourself at first but over time just the sheer repetition it becomes familiar it feels safe to use your language and so you start going oh yeah this really is wait a second no this isn't true but you've repeated it so many times that actually you you do come to believe it um how do you help people through that process do you just say have faith trust me repeat it enough or do you have a different insight on that so the more you practice it i want to first share why because i go into this in in the book we actually have part of our our mind our brain it's called the reticular activating system so like you mentioned earlier we're very grateful for this little part of our brain because like you mentioned earlier we can't take it all in at once we can't think every thought at once we can't attend every stimuli in this in this exact moment at once we would completely overwhelm our system so we have a little part of our mind that determines what's relevant for us and it filters out anything else that's not relevant the common example is when you decide you're going to buy a new particular type of car right so now you've you've practiced thinking about this car you're researching it you're going all these car lots and now all you see is everyone driving that same car cars didn't just appear on the road you just started to pay attention because now that car is relevant to you same thing happens with all of our beliefs beliefs originated simply as a thought that we practiced over time that then got validated by our experience because typically our thought arose from some experience that happened and then any similar experience connects to those same thoughts and then we become really practiced and then our reticular activating system comes on the scene and sets us up to confirm our belief our thought because i've practiced it long enough so any opposing evidence in that moment so say i'm not worthy is my common thought it's for many of us any evidence in this moment of my worthiness will be deleted and all i'll see is that side look or that call that went unanswered all i'll see is evidence for how unworthy i am and we're doing this unbeknownst to ourselves day in and day out so to create a new belief like i said first we want to spend less time with our old beliefs entertaining them engaging with them while we don't anticipate that they're going to leave right away we can refocus our attention the more we rehearse than new beliefs we're actually priming that reticular activating system so now we become a little more expansive and i can let a little more new information in from my environment so before long when i start to actually see confirmation of this new belief in real time that's when i began to shift i don't think anything is a greater teacher personally tom than wisdom living the experience of change so i can sit here on podcast after podcast and tell everyone all of the beliefs i've changed about myself i urge everyone out there to create change for themselves and you do it by practicing a new thought by over time allowing in a little more confirmatory evidence of that new thought and then before you know it you do start to see more and more evidence and now you've lived the experience of changing a belief all right let's get in the weeds about self-worth i think that this is a fascinating one and my sort of short punch line to self-worth is for you to have self-worth you have to do something you think is worthy and that there is an element of what you're talking about you're going to rehearse that thought you're going to open yourself up for some more confirming evidence but if you're not doing things that you actually value it's going to be really hard to develop that sense of self-worth your idea of little promises i think is is a brilliant step in that i said i was going to do it and i did it that's confirming evidence of self-worth do you have something else that you um give to people to use as they develop that i think self-worth originates when we take care of self it can be as simple as caring for the self's physical body for some of us the habits and patterns we learned aren't self-honoring aren't self-aware aren't tailored to me and my body's physical experience so for a lot of us we begin to rebuild our self-worth when we first and foremost keep those small promises reversing that pattern of self-betrayal which is just i've made a lot of promises that i haven't kept so now that i begin to make promises that i'm keeping i'm showing myself that alignment and for a lot of us it does originate around just general day in and day out i call it re-parenting behaviors self-care how am i tending to my physical body can i become worth it to be someone who cares for their physical needs how about emotionally the harder harder still right going down another layer can i be someone who cares for my own emotional needs right when i'm zapped when i don't have resources about me can i tend to that or do i continue to power through and show up in the world for everyone else can i be worth it in those small ways and as i develop confidence and as i empower myself by keeping promises in those areas now i can start to create right a new experience another snowball rolling down where now i can begin to set intentions right of action of creating of living my purpose in the world of doing things that are maybe a bit more externally worthy and i think the sense that you're asking i believe though to simplify the answer it begins in small daily things many of us are confirming a narrative of unworthiness because we're not showing up for ourselves in the smallest of ways no question can you define re-parenting that that is an element of the book that i found really interesting so re-parenting is is the daily habits and patterns that typically center around are three areas of need so what re-parenting is typically it's in adulthood a process that each of us you know undertake very individualized based on developing new habits in the areas where we could better modify some of those older habits and patterns and better meet our unique needs as an adult one thing i find interesting about the concept and tell me if this is intentional and why you named it that is so when you think about parenting it automatically conjures images of the parent and the child and when i think about the mind and the relationship that we have with our sort of conscious behaviors and our subconscious behaviors the conscious behavior becomes the new parent who's doing your future self journaling they're setting intention they've developed awareness and now they're essentially communicating through what i think you would call practicing the behavior to the subconscious that's acting ways that are not beneficial doing things that you know you would want to gently guide a child away from was that intentional in calling it re-parenting yes um i actually call it the wise intra-parent inner parent which we all want to cultivate and what inner child work is is really honoring that we do all have that at space in our subconscious that contains those habits those patterns a lot of times it contains those more immature coping mechanisms where quite literally i scream and yell when i'm upset or i storm off and i take my toys and i don't want to talk to you anymore i do a little bit of both a lot of times we see that around our emotional reaction so it's honoring that we all have that inner child-like space within us again it's stored in our subconscious so our goal is that expansion same thing creating that consciousness where i can see those unexpressed needs those old habits those old patterns i can witness them compassionately right developing that wise inner parent just like a guide like you're saying man as a metaphor that one is so beautiful that one really hits home for me in terms of as somebody's going through the process when they're doing the work that you're talking about for them to have one a metaphor that when done well conjures images of warmth and nurturing and caretaking and patience and love and bringing all of those things to this process which can be a very long process of constantly coming back to ground zero and there can be a lot of frustration around that you know and and just walking yourself through it the way that you would show patience to a child that you love it that really landed for me i like that a lot and of course it's it's for many most of us i should say much more difficult in practice a lot of us do so much more quickly extend compassion i've noticed and i noticed this to myself to others more quickly than we do so to ourselves so i just want to you know end by honoring the fact that it is a process and a lot of times the first step of it is acknowledging all of the ways and areas where we're not compassionate with ourself and then obviously beginning to break some of those habits spending a little less time in that critical voice so that over time we can make space for the much more compassionate experience that you're beautifully describing well my friend tell people where they can find you because you have become a true sort of wise inner parent to so many people and what you're putting out there is so extraordinarily useful where can people connect so each and every day i'm on the instagram account that started it all at the dot holistic dot psychologist and on there i'm sharing daily tools and healing sharing aspects of my journey and i always love to shout out the amazing community of self-healers that exist and that is always engaging with the work on that page and i say that as someone who a big motivator for myself in the journey and the online aspect of it was looking for that community of people knowing that healing can be incredibly lonely so there's a youtube page as well that's currently getting revamped at the dot or the holistic psychologist that anyone can check out so in the next month or two that'll be unrolled with a new look for the daily or the weekly teaching videos nice well guys trust me this is a book you're going to want to read how to do the work by the extraordinary nicole lapera so make sure that you guys check it out it's really a phenomenal read and speaking of things that are phenomenal if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care so even in the darkest moments of despair getting sober at 25 it was that faith that led me into the next right action remembering trauma in 2016 it was the faith that got me out of bed in the morning and out of that desperation

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 208,601

Rating: 4.9144278 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, impact theory, impacttheory, inside quest, insidequest, it, theory impact, tom bilyeu, tom bilyou, tombilyeu, change my behavior, childhood trauma, create future, dr nicole lepera, emotional trauma healing, escape negative patterns, heal from emotional trauma, heal subconscious trauma from childhood

Id: MvYMG1cZGNw

Length: 63min 8sec (3788 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021